redefining mobility on big screen android devices

iOS

So you got yourself a rather expensive mobile toy and besides Facebook, you really are just wasting time on it playing games and taking photos. But do you know that you can make some beer money for yourself while at it? The technology is here and it’s up to you to get the ball rolling.

Here are some of the possibilities listed below.

Broadcast your gameplay on Twitch and YouTube

These are just two of the most popular channels to make money that has taken the world by storm. Gaming is a big market and there are so called pro gamers who spend all their time making videos online for their gameplay as a guide for newbies on YouTube. Think of PewDiePie, who started recording his gameplay and posting it to YouTube, he’s now elevated himself to the status of Internet Celebrity with his whimsical channel on cold hard Swedish humor. How could a country that gave us Abba in the 70s produce such talent is beyond me. maybe it has to do with their fermented herring, Surstromming? Which enjoys the status of being the most horrible tasting food next to Icelandic fermented shark meat. PewDiePie makes an average of US$4 million a year from this alone!

Twitch is a gaming only site where you can post your gameplay and commentary. It is the biggest ass kicker for online game voyeurism but the Twitch App for mobile does not allow you to stream your gameplay to the channel for this you need to get a little smarter by recording your gameplay and streaming it later on a PC.

Samsung’s GameRecorder+ is the only one that works best for game recording and unfortunately available only on their Galaxy App store. For iOS, you need to find a screen recorder….and there isn’t any. Apple thinks its wrong to let an app record what you are doing onscreen. Go figure. The only way to do a recording of your gameplay is to broadcast it via a third party hardware accessory needed for video output. Need I say more?

For Android, many of the available apps for screen recording require your device be jailbroken, but those running Lollipop will be spared this messy step. Samsung’s Galaxy GameRecorder+ is the only one that allows you to record this seamlessly while also recording your narrative live from the front facing camera. Neat!

Get Famous on YouNow

Not recommended for introverts, ISIL guerrilla recruiters or Dems and GOP candidates, YouNow is an entertainment channel that rivals that of Periscope and Meerkat on Twitter. It regularly pulls in US$1 million in revenue every month with top YouNow celebs earning US$10,000 a month.

The YouNow mobile app allows you to broadcast live from your mobile device so the only thing you need to fret about is the mobile data bandwidth. The mobile app is a self contained broadcast channel so you can’t include pre-recorded streams.

Aside from this one restriction, everything is live. Yep. Talk, play, do that juggling act or say stupid jokes. If an Arab working in a convenience store can be an online celebrity on YouNow, why can’t you?

Make that Photo Pay for itself

So you like photography? Great. Where do you start to make some beer money from what you do? The iPhone camera is great while the Galaxy S6 is even better. Pictures you take can be enhanced anyway you like and once you have a great photo, why not see if you can sell it or enter it in a photo challenge?

Scoopshot is one that you can make some money out of your mobile photography pictures. Just submit a photo to their task challenges and get paid between US$10 to US$50 per photo.

How it works is simple. Photo Buyers with a budget will send out regional or global photo challenges with the winners getting their photos bought for the stated reward. Each is different and you can enter as many as you like as long as the photo is captured according to the buyer’s brief…that’s on how it should taken, and if faces of models can be seen or not seen.

FOAP is for selling Brand related Photos

Available for both iOS and Android, FOAP operates in a similar manner to Scoopshot but the key difference is that its photo contest challenges are sponsored by brands. They pay more too of course and FOAP has been winning hearts of those who love to drink. There are tonnes of food and lifestyle contest that must feature the brand owners products in your photo shots and many of them involving having fun or just foodie with drinks shots. Rewards vary, some offering as little as US$100 or up to thousands if a car brand is involved.

Snapwire is for anyone looking for crowd sourced Images

Snapwire is an app designed for just about anyone who is on the look out for unique photos to buy. These days, buying a royalty image can be a real pain as you have to spend countless hours doing it. So why not get someone to shoot it for you instead?

Rewards vary but it can range from anything from US$50 to US$800. So if the US dollar is king in your country, you may find it very worthwhile to shoot images for these request. Some request are pretty mundane others are plain simple. The challenge is to submit an image that will sell.

There are clear guidelines on what is needed in the brief and you are also told if a model release is required. More often than not, these request are far less sticky compared to submitting to microstock image agencies so even if you are just practicing your photography with an iPhone, you can still submit your worst shots and see how that fares.

Are there any other Ways of Making Money with your Mobile?

It depends on you really because if you don’t mind mining for Bitcoin, there is an app for that too. But let’s be clear, Bitcoin mining isn’t made for mobile. It is getting harder and harder to keep the blockchain going and for your efforts, you are only earning a handful of bit cents. That to me makes no sense to me.

Other methods are all indirect, and doesn’t give you an end result. There are no mobile video only microstock agency as yet making them on a mobile app is still a long way off. Video editing tools are relatively hum drum on mobile devices and unless you get a hardware bump upwards, shooting them and editing them to acceptable quality on mobile is way off.

If you cite apps like Uber, HomeAway, Flipkey and Airbnb, those require you to have a home or a car and unless you have that, you can’t partake in the business.

Vayable is an app for Tourist guide wannabes. Available only on iOS, it looks for guides in cities or places which you have insider knowledge over. If you qualify as one, you may just get hired for the day. The problem with this sort of services is that you need to verify yourself as a local guide with video post and presentations using a desktop computer. The mobile app, like Airbnb, is only used to market your services.

Demotix is a news portal that shouts out loud on citizen journalism but having your news featured and bought is a tough call for one simple reason, you have to capture pictures on your phone camera and file the whole story with it. Both iOS and Android apps are supported. Unless you live in a place that is far from traditional news centers, your chances of being featured will be better. Most of the news happening now is already being captured by paid journalist and unless it is in a war zone, where news agencies are loath to send their own paid interns, then you might have a shot at getting your news sold.

Crowd sourcing is a big part of this equation these days. To be part of a Lyft or Airbnb experience, you need to have something to offer. So do your homework before you sign up.

So photography is going mobile, and what’s your weapon of choice? We all know that the mobile phone’s camera is just too small to support quality imaging in low light, so what’s your plan? Since Christmas is round the corner would you want a DSLR, or would you consider something simpler, like maybe a lens camera? The Lens Camera, a camera system pioneered by Sony with its QX series didn’t quite shine as brightly as people thought. But the concept was a hit and there are so many pretenders from China emulating the lens camera that sells for as little as 100 bucks online. However if you want the real deal here are three to consider.

DxO One

DXO One Taking a cue from the Olympus Air, the DxO One is the lens camera that is built especially for the iPhone as it uses a dedicated lightning connector to bridge its control and imaging capabilities. The cost of DxO One cost in the ballpark of US$600. Sensor size is as small as the Nikon System 1, probably smaller is good but not the sensor. With 20 megapixels at your disposal, the iPhone 6s won’t be a competitor. DxO captures both RAW and JPGs so it will be a useful fit. Unfortunately it does not support 4K video capture.

Aside from this, connectivity is only through the lighting port for iPhones only. Sounds like a dumb idea but hey, Android devices are already hitting the 16-20 megapixel output mark and the only brand that needs a camera upgrade comes from Apple.

Olympus Air Lens Camera

Retailing in the ball park of about US$400 with a 14-42 kit lens, this baby is really a m4/3 camera that takes in any m4/3 lens. That means the sensor size of this baby is 16 megapixels but with a much larger sensor than that found on the DxO.

By now, you’d realize that there is a heck of a lot of great lenses on the Olympus Air since it shares the same mount as the ones used by its mirrorless cousins. You have a wide choice of lens, including pancake type fixed lenses so there is no mistaking the quality you’d be getting from it.

The m4/3 platform has a lot of supporters, including lens mounts to use Leica lenses. So if you have an M mount lense, just get an adaptor for the m4/3 and you’re ready to go.

The downside is that video capture is restricted to 1080p so it’s no big deal here. Works for both iOS and Android.

Sony ILCE-QX1L

Sony was the pioneer but sine the Q1, they have asserted that what you need is really an E-mount camera lens that will take in all of Sony’s NEX camera lenses. Sensor size is APS-C, so this is one big baby with 1080p video capture. The lenses are not as compact of small as m4/3 but big sensors need big lenses. Again, you can buy lens mount adaptors to fit Leica M lenses if you so desire so this won’t pose a huge problem should you want a jump in imaging quality. This QX1 cost in the ballpark of US$550.

Photography is Mobile

In the age of the budget airline, you are encouraged to travel light. Gone are the days where you pack a whole bag of lenses along with the DSLR with a tripod in tow. Having a modular lens camera is really the way forward as you only need a small bag to contain three lenses along with a Gorrilapod tripod for those low light moments.

Image quality is subjective as it really depends on you, the user. If you are happy with the quality after checking out those images posted up on Flickr, then you’d be quite satisfied with the money you are parting with.

Video capture is still stuck in the 1080p era but that’s not a bad thing is it? Those wanting 4K output would be better off shooting with the Galaxy S6 stock camera…instead of a lens camera.

The lens camera is centered around still photography and for those looking for something affordable without compromising their E mount, M mount or m4/3 mounted lenses, your choices are all here.

The Lens Camera habitually co-exist with your mobile device, without it, photography would be meaningless as you can’t perform image compositions. This is probably one gadget that will grow in years to come as people ditch their hefty DSLRs for something smaller to carry about.

Digital imaging and digital photography will in time get even cheaper and those with their foot in the door with a Lens Camera will be ahead of those without a similar product.

Google owned Waze is probably one of those navigation apps that people often try to avoid using since it is an online app without offline access. But Waze begs to differ by having Arnie as a voice talent in the backseat guiding you in Waze. That’s right folks the Guvanator is back and he’s got a load for you.

To have him on Waze, all you have to do is download and run Waze, go to Settings>Sounds > hit the ‘ English US or UK’ and you’d be taken to a selection of voices you can download. Within the list you will find Terminator Genisys and that’s what you want.

This movie tie in is one of a kind as Arnie narrates his way to your destination and even says “Hasta la vista, Baby” once you arrive at your intended destination.

During the movie debut, Terminator logos will be popping up in your Waze map to indicate cinemas and multiplexes, though I am not sure if that would include cinemas ‘not showing’ the movie when it launches.

This latest installment of the Terminator franchise will only make its debut in the US in July while the rest of the world will catch it before then.

I rarely print my photos these days as everything is shared digitally but there will come a time when having a printed pictures will matter. So what’s the option if you are on the road traveling? Should you go to one of those print kiosk found in shopping malls or carry a portable printer?

Canon makes a slew of portable printers capable of 4R or postcard size prints. But these are still pretty expensive and bulky to carry around. Your best bet if you want to go fully digital is the LG Zink inspired pocket printer….or if you want to go analogue, the Fujifilm SP-1.

Price wise, there is some difference. The SP-1 retails for US$145 while the LG PD239 goes for a little less at US$120. The real difference is in the cost of operation, with the Fuji instax mini film costing US$83 for a 100 sheets while the LG Pocket Printer’s Zink paper weighing in at US$57 for 120 sheets.

in terms of paper size both are just a tad smaller than the average business card aspect ratio, the Fuji Instax mini is larger but the printed area is really much smaller thanks largely to the format’s border. So with the LG, you not only get a larger printed area but a full bleed right to the edge as well.

Needless to say the winner is clearly the LG Zink formatted print.

Quality of Print

Here is the trick. For some reason, the LG printer has a tendency to print images which are about one EV lower in brightness than what you see on your digital device. To get a brighter picture, you need to print the photo with a adjusted setting via the iOS or Android app. This is not a huge problem but it pays to know as every print wasted is going to cost you.

The LG Pocket Printer is a pretty simple in design and operation. There are no confusing buttons to play with as everything is Bluetooth enabled. If you have an NFC enabled device, it will work too.

The operation from editing to firmware updates are carried out via the mobile app.

Real World Appeal

This is where I have problems with the print size. It’s really doesn’t quite justify the appeal even if your photos look great. The business card sized print is probably a good way to share a business contact or print out pictures for your scrap book. Beyond that, I can really find a good enough reason to buy or use one.

I think Zink has done a pretty good job with the printer and the quality of the print. The colors, clarity and sharpness is good for any physical sharing of photos but the practicality of the whole exercise remains to be seen.

You could of course create lots of small prints for decorative use on any wall or door. And if you want something better than that, I can’t think of anything.

The LG Pocket Printer has its own battery good enough for about an hour of use and you can charge it via any microUSB cable with a battery pack.

If you travel far, it is probably a good way to share your photos with the people around you who are not on the Internet or have no access to such technologies. To me, this doesn’t happen often enough to warrant having one.

Zink has partnered with the likes of Polaroid to come out with Android related camera+printer but the same problem will arise when you start using it. Because of its relatively small size, images of wide open vistas, architecture or anything taken with a wide angle view cannot be appreciated. The print size works best with subjects either close up of at medium distance. So if you do have an immediate use for such small prints, it makes good sense to get one but for everyone else, it will sit on the corner table gathering dust until someone digs it up again.

To Print or not to Print?

Nice to have but I can’t think of a reason to carry one with me all the time. How you wish to use this is really up to you. The personal printer with a format this small is ideal for scrapbook making. No problem with you sticking the print outs onto your Moleskine pads with double sided tape.

Beyond this, you could give away those prints to strangers who do selfies with you.

In the digital age, printing something just doesn’t make much sense. You can send a virtual postcard instead of snail mailing them like in the past and post your images to Facebook for sharing with the people in your network.

The quality of the Zink print is pretty good, but I have no idea if they would last a life time as the colors could fade. Only time will tell if this is going to be worth your investment.

That’s right. Flickr is so screwed when Google announced that the new feature coming to Google Photos is going to give you an unlimited back up of all your photos. Even Star Trek fans got stumped with their ‘space; the final frontier’ motto on this one and for good reason.

For years, Facebook detractors have been saying that Google+ was doomed to die. They weren’t very far off from this but somehow this has changed as the shake up at G+ gave life to a digital corpse. The old hats running G+ were fucking idiots. They didn’t have a plan or strategy to out run the cross hairs of Facebook.

True. G+ is not FB and FB isn’t G+.

Technically speaking, both use the same model to make money off you. By getting you to use their service, you become a candidate for targeted advertising.

Google Photos came automatically installed on your Android device with G+ app. This was inherently stupid of course but Google Photos had some nice functionality to it. The auto back up feature and auto-awesome gif images were nice additional features but come on, G+ like FB app were storage hogs on both iOS and Android devices. Picture wise, Google had to outgun the old FB and this they have done in style.

Facebook and G+ apps are big on storage. Don’t believe me, go do the maths on your storage requirement an you’ll notice that they are not only fat and bloated but offer little else in return for your digital needs. Google’s new Photos app is only moveable to internal storage of your Android device so that precious RAM can be saved for G+.

Facebook does none of these and even scales down your high resolution images so they never get stored in their original form.

Google Photos and DNG File Format

While iOS is still stuck in the stone age of JPG, Google has advanced its computational photography capabilities to include DNG files on its future camera app. Google is thinking in the line that if a picture can be processed better, then it can be a better picture for anything from Bokeh to Photo Spheres. Google Drive already supports TIFF files, a fact not known to many. When uploading your DNG files from your web browser, you can choose where it goes….to the infinite cloud space or the limited one as in Google Drive.

Saving pictures in DNG is going to take a lot of space. Ask any Trekkie and they will tell you what all this amounts to. When Google said that it would give you photo back up….infinitely….you can technically put your Android device to upload all those pictures you have taken in the day through WIFI to Google cloud storage. You can also access Google Photos on the web.

And when you wake up from your deep slumber in the morning, those photos on your Android device and be erased as a copy already exist in the cloud.

Google’s cloud is impressive to say the least and is far cheaper than the image cloud service provided by Apple. Thankfully, you still have Google Photos for iOS so Apple users aren’t at a loss.

Google Stories

This is another advantage which few talk about. Google Stories is a scrap booking feature for you to create a flipbook slideshow of your images right within the Google Photos app. And that’s not all, like Flickr, your chosen photos can also be shared with a long list of other social networks.

Everything has been done to death so when someone thinks of something so simple and yet so useful, well, you gotta hand it to them.

PushBullet is one of those apps that resides both on your mobile and your Desktop PC that deserves attention. Why? Coz for the longest time, everyone wanted something like this but no one bothered to do it as it just seems…well too simple to be of any serious use.

There are other ways to achieve what PushBullet does, but as a complete package, there are no competitors.

The Great Mobile Disconnect

Push notifications on your mobile reside on your mobile, and each time you get a notification from your mobile app, you have to pick up your device to reply and read those messages.

While on the desktop, you could be looking for some information and when you find a link you need to pass on to your mobile device, you can’t because the only way is to use Evernote or Google Keep, pasting the URL, and getting that on your mobile device.

How about the time you wanted to pass on an image from your mobile to your desktop? The fastest way was actually to save it to Dropbox and have that file saved back locally on your desktop PC hard drive. That’s like taking the scenic route to the book store.

PushBullet can do this and more. It can also make use of your mobile functions like replying your SMS from your desktop computer as long as the two are connected.

PushBullet on PC

Currently, it supports browsers such as Safari, Opera, Chrome and Firefox. The sharing of links and files is pretty solid except for maybe large files which will take a while to send over to your mobile device. There is another app, Caast.me, which is similar but uses a QR code to connect your mobile to your PC browser.

For Pushbullet, the connection is done only once on your computer, that is once you link your mobile to your account, it will forever be there. To add more desktops, tablets and phones, you just click to add on your profile dashboard and you’re done.

What’s more you can also message your friend who are PushBullet users. If they are not PushBullet users, they will be notified to join up. I know this sounds kinda lame, since IM is probably the most abused and misused feature on mobile these days and with so many providers already offering IM services, it cease to be a unique selling point. But when integrated as a package, I can see the difference in the overall workflow experience.

PushBullet Workflow

This is what sets everything apart. As a stand alone app on your mobile, you can say that it is pretty useless as the only feature it has which differentiates itself from the rest is the news channel subscriptions.

There are several news channels or news aggregators which you can subscribe to for free—allowing you to periodically receive the latest news on the Internet. It doesn’t have proper news channels like CNN or NYT but it does support a host of industry channels from gaming to tech happenings. Beyond that, it offers nothing else for mobile users.

However for people who work from desktop PCs and mobile devices, this is a very handy tool as files and links gets passed around easily and shared with people on your IM list.

What’s more, you can also have project group mates who you might want to send URL links to instead of writing them an email. And who reads emails these days? When you get 100s a day, it gets pretty lame trying to sieve through them, and these are work emails and not the spam variety you find on supermarket shelves.

The UX is very well thought out. On mobile, it sits there as any standard app without IM capabilities. So there is no fussing around. You can also turn off the pushed notifications whenever you like or have them pushed ONLY while you are connected on WIFI.

The folks at PushBullet are still building this beast of a service in the hope of being bought out. I think they have done a great job coming this far. Lets hope it stays that way. I can already the hawks in the Internet industry descending on them to take them out. What they provide is inherently very simple but it is the way that it is delivered that makes them world class.

I live outside of the US and love using VPN to mask my actual location, but not for safer browsing but for region coded content found on the Internet.

I have in the past written about VPNs for use in many situations, least of all for posting to Facebook while in China. But for us who live outside of where the content is region coded, then it becomes a censorship problem. Web censorship is real. Everywhere you go, there is some form of censorship where URLs are blocked for political or religious reasons. But for some of us, we just want to enjoy free content which has been region restricted. For example, YouPorn.com is blocked in many countries and if you happen to love watching free internet porn, you have come to the right place. Hola will satisfy all your desires….for free!

P2P VPN is here…at a Cost

All things free isn’t what it is believed to be, so here’s the stuff Hola won”t tell you. Hola VPN doesn’t make use of a secure connection but a mix of P2P/CDN. Think of it like TOR, the secure network used by Edward Snowden, every computer becomes an exit node, so if you are a user based in China, Hola lets you access Facebook via someone’s exit node in the USA where Facebook isn’t blocked.

Browsing YouPorn from Singapore? You gotta have Hola!

Hola relies on YOUR data download and upload bandwidth when you use their VPN to serve other users. So if you happen to have a paltry bandwidth limit on your mobile and keep Hola running all day long, you will exhaust your data limit in a day or two. This can happen if more people choose to browse from the country where you reside. Inside the mobile app, you have a long list of country to choose from, and from it, pick a country you wish to browse from. Hola also operates a CDN, content distribution network, which caches popular content for user to download and stream.

Hola is a free Android app that you can download right now and I suspect that the app is still in Beta. But don’t let that deter you as it works pretty much like a web browser with VPN access. The VPN service is unlimited and is automatically switched on when you launch the app. Hola is still adding more content sources and sorting out the bugs within the app. Even their latest update was very buggy (Feb 18).

How Hola Aims to Change Your Browsing Habits

The P2P network protocol used by Hola is pretty vague at the moment. By opening your own Internet connection to others, you are letting dudes like the NSA come through your browser and into your computer or mobile device. Data leeching can happen since you can’t tell if they are real users or data mining bots. The only security control is to bypass this is to sign up for their premium plan where Hola is prevented from using your computer or mobile as an exit node. Hola could change the way you browse the Internet in China but Chinese URL blockers will eventually find a way around it once they determine the exact DNS Hola operates from. For now, it is a free for all for everyone.

However if you are hoping to browse for content from the US, well you are in luck. Hola works perfectly. With it, you can pretend to surf from the US or for that matter Australia, Britain or Iran for that matter….the choice are up to you but if you are looking for content, just stick to the old time favs.

Hola integrates several streaming services with its own app, such as Pandora, Hulu and Netflix. For Netflix, you need a paid account to get access but you can fib your way to a free one month trial by signing up (with a credit card). I didn’t need to test Facebook or for that matter Google Plus since those are not banned from where I was. But it would be of interest to those who are heading to China.

There is a desktop plug in for PCs, created for Firefox and Chrome and the moment you install it, you will notice some slowdown when you browse using Hola. It could be using your connection as an exit node. To avoid people piggy backing on your bandwidth, you can sign up for Hola premium.

On Android, Hola app pretty much uses a default USA setting for streaming media so you have to change it to the UK if you happen to use it to access BBC content.

For now, Hola for me is the place to go to for all my TV shows on Hulu. My only regret is that I don’t have a Hulu Plus membership to get to all the episodes I want to watch.

Hola for iOS is NOT Free

Please don’t ask me why but you only get a 7 day trial after which you have to pay as long as you are a Apple user. iOS has never had it this good as users are generally considered richer than their Android cousins thus Apple iPhone users have to pay to get access after seven days. This is the premium sign up. So you don’t get people hogging your bandwidth. It is the perfect solution for iPhone users who love using their phones all the time.

Billed as the portable network storage drive for the iOS totting masses, this little device is precisely what the doctor ordered whenever you complain of not having storage space on your iPhone. Now as you may have guessed, someone in the US has sued Apple over the claims of usable storage space on base iOS devices recently. A 16GB iPhone has 23 percent of its storage taken over by the operating system. Though not exactly cybersquatting, Apple’s iOS occupancy cannot be evicted from storage, thus making it difficult for people with borderline budgets to buy an iPhone with larger storage capacities.

The Egg helps you sort this mess out as it operates as a virtual network drive with WIFI/USB connection to offload your images and videos you have on the device without having to resort to messy Cloud storage. Now, we all know that Cloud is great but the slower upload speeds often gives a bitter sweet after taste upon backup. Upload speeds are often a third of what you get with download speeds for either WIFI or 3G and since 4G is not an ever present option, people often struggle with slow uploads for back ups.

Right now, this Egg is still finding support on Kickstarter. Based on the prices advertised so far, it’s not cheap. The 64GB version cost you US$199 and for the price of a 128GB version, you can virtually buy yourself a portable WIFI HD with 1TB of storage.

Yes the Egg can work for both iOS and Android but from the looks of it, iOS users are the main target since storage is not expandable. The network storage is itself a computer using Samsung’s Tizen operating system. Just read the tech specs below to get a better idea.

TECHNICAL SPECS

Application Processor and OS

Intel® Atom™ Processor

1GB RAM

64/128/256GB eMMC

OS: Linux (Tizen)

Connectivity

WiFi a/b/g/n, BT4.0

Micro-USB 2.0 type-AB with USB charging

Audio

Vibra motor (haptics + silent ringtones), Speaker notifications

Display

Size: 2.4” Multi-Touch capacitive touch TFT

Resolution: 240×320; 262K colors

Sensors

Accelerometer, Compass, Ambient Light Sensor

Now with WIFI, you can virtually connect to any device that supports it, including GoPro and DSLR cameras. But would you? The makers of the Egg will give you a website on eggcyte.com if you back them early but there is no mention of functionality or would this be another Cloud based storage should you want to back up that ‘backed up’ album already on your Egg.

Storage Alternatives

WD already makes a Network Drive that is mobile and portable and for 1TB of storage, it cost less than US$199.

The only difference is that there is no user interface on the WD drives as compared to the Egg. Price wise per MB, it is of course cheaper with WD Passport WIFI drives but it’s also a bit larger too. Women might find the Egg a better option (no ovulation pun intended) as it would fit nicely in a Prada handbag.

For the rest of us who take loads of videos and photos, the WD drive would be a better option. With 1TB storage, you can probably shoot till the cows come home and still have plenty left over for the next.

The recent paranoia about the NSA going after your private information has left a bitter after taste for many of us. So what is private anymore? What about your diary or daily journal?

There are two schools of thought. The diary can be a private place, but some might prefer to show it off online. Some may just want to record their darkest days in writing and never share it with the world.

If you have a need to keep a daily journal of some sort, the last place you’d keep them would be Facebook or Instagram. turning your daily thoughts and feelings into words has consequences.

Then you have the problem of monetization. Cloud based diary platforms need to make money to fund their service. A cloud based service that is free is probably a good idea but you will find them shutting down if it proves to be unprofitable. Every diary platform startup is looking to social media as a means of monetization. Who knows? Mark Zuckerberg could just drop by your front door and buy you up. This was the case for DAYS for iOS where Yahoo snapped them up out of the blue.

Diary for Mobile for iOS and Android

This is actually the web app for the service Diary.com. It is not a bad site and addresses the simple issue of having both private and public pages. Public pages are for people to read your stuff, so don’t post porn.

Besides this, the site also supports pictures, which you are free to add at anytime but unfortunately, there isn’t any room for video.

For people looking for the most basic option of having to write and post pictures of their daily life, Diary Mobile is probably a good place to start. The short learning curve means you’d be posting in no time at all.

For users who want are aiming to have something more social, like a journal or blog. This fits the cake nicely but there are huge differences between the two mobile version. The iOS version is straight laced, no editing after posting, no task list. Whereas the Android version has this and more but the picture posting capabilities are non-functioning at the time of review.

DAYRE for iOS and Android

Public diary. It’s a good start but users are few at the moment and if you are looking for followers, it might not be the place as it has yet to gain much user traction. For writing, it is not the best option as there is a 500 character limit on your post. As a visual diary with a few words thrown in. It has its appeal.

The UI is clunky. You are given a choice of blogging using locations, words, video or with pictures. Location information is optional of course if you want to keep you blogging destination secret. The inclusion of cartoon stickers somehow seems to create the impression that it is more for the young and if you happen to be a hip brand for youngsters, it could be a good place to start.

Like most photo sharing apps, the app gives you a range of preset filters to color your world. Not the most imaginative option but it does the job. Images and topics can be hash tagged for easier searches but exploring the community is a bit of a hit or miss affair. There is no way around this. It is very similar to Instagram and limits your text post to under 500 characters. The chronological post platform isn’t conducive for marketing and you don’t automatically get a grid view of all your post.

Dayre doesn’t have a web browser interface and this means it only exist on mobile. It might give you web access eventually but it could be quite a while in waiting.

DAYS for iOS

Yahoo made quite a splash when they purchased this new startup which publishes a timeline diary that is more photo centric. The visual diary catalogs what you capture on a daily basis and arranges them as a daily post. You can only post items from a day ago rather than post as you go along.

Sharing is possible by connecting it to Facebook but that’s hardly a innovation these days. I like the concept of Days but its execution is flawed. The UI profile reminds me more of a photo sharing site than a visual diary. That said, there is nothing stopping you from doing the same with your current Instagram feed.

What’s more, you don’t get to enter much information. It does however recognize photos that are taken in a quick sequence and puts them together as an animated gif.

The time stamp of your photos are basically put up in bold before you upload them to your visual time line. Each of these represents the hours of the day and it up to you to add some captions to them.

There is no separate blogging feature where you can go “Dear Diary…yada yada yada yada….”. That said, it might suit those who have little to say or prefer to let their pictures speak for them.

Memoires: the Diary for Android

This is an app created by a Victor Nakonechny, and it is probably one of the best examples of an old world diary made current with the help of technology. There is no public post, no web platform for social discovery. Nada.

It is a private diary app that has everything you need to pen your journal and file it away in secret to the cloud. Even the NSA would have a hard time getting to it once you encrypt it. You can add voice notes, location information, pictures and weather information. Data then can be encrypted for safe keeping. This is probably the best way to keep a private journal, and by syncing it to cloud storage, it can be kept anywhere you choose. Full marks for it being a private journal of sorts.

Backkom Diary

Designed to work on with the Samsung Galaxy Note series of devices, this has gotta be the most whimsical of all diary apps. There is a non-pen version on the Samsung Store but haven’t seen it on the Google Playstore. It’s been around since the first Galaxy note and I don’t know if it was meant for kids or grown ups who want to be kids. The app is clunky to navigate. It even has a calendar function which you add birthdays, anniversaries, etc for good measure.

Backkom is really the name of a animated character named Bernard the Polar Bear, where in South Korea, he’s known as Backkom. Not sure if you’d swing with this but the whimsical tone and UI does turn people off. Again, this is not a social or cloud storage based diary. Your pictures and scribblings are saved to the device itself and there is no way of exporting. Personally, it functions better as a To-do list. There are alarms that you can set but beyond this, not much else.

Choosing a Platform that Suits You

I hate to say this but the free wheeling days of a the startup is over. After the consolidation of social media platforms, the big names in SNS are not buying up diary platforms to integrate to their existing social media properties. Facebook probably might buy one up eventually as this is the missing puzzle from their suite but Google already has the capability by integrating its blogging platform, blogspot.com, into G+. Mobile only access is probably one of the difficult justifications for a diary. What if you have no access to your mobile device, how would you put in an entry?

If you want to be publicly noticed by the NSA, then keep a journal or a blog online. Those diary apps are not going to win you a legion of followers unless you’re a porn star. The only advantage a mobile diary is that you have access to it as long as you are free to write or record plenty of pictures at the end of the day.

There are plenty of other diary apps out there which are competing for social interaction. I could review dozens on iOS and Android platforms so take your time to shop around for one that suits you best.

So how do you make your service cool again? Having spent the last 10 years milking the same traffic, Facebook has to reinvent itself and this is where Paper comes in.

I am one of those who resolutely refuse to install the Facebook App on my primary device, it is by all accounts a resource hog and taking up a massive 56MB of RAM. On Android devices, Facebook offers you Messenger for chat and Facebook Pages to manage your brand and followers. The total cost in RAM? Roughly 100MB of RAM space when all three is running. You could delete FB Messenger and save roughly 36MB of RAM since it also duplicates your SMS app but that’s about all you can save.

Ultimately, this is a lot of space for those who are already saddled with 1GB of RAM, the Facebook app works in the background getting notifications and stuff from your fan pages so you can’t power that down. I ejected Facebook app from my primary smartphone since it is just a browser for my timeline. It doesn’t do much beyond that.

I did explore the possibility of using a third-party app, which at best, did the same thing….feed me with lots of adverts right into my time line. But these are poor copies that duplicates the service via the mobile web app feed.

FB Paper

Why would Facebook put out Paper (which is at best… a Flipboard clone)? Well the original Facebook app isn’t cool anymore. With Paper, you have the ability to browse content outside of your Facebook network, which makes it a handy app to use on a day-to-day basis without looking at the same old Facebook timeline content.

Paper borrows heavily from Google Now as it uses a card base system to feature content. To read more or dismiss a card, you only have to swipe it away. The old Facebook app was complicated and didn’t support swipe controls—it was designed to work just like the desktop browser based timeline and that was a dull move. The left to right and right to left swipe didn’t do much but for Paper, it does a hell of a lot more. The idea behind it is really to get people to use the app more often and NOT just to view their Facebook timeline so it is more useful.

Paper also has the neat feature of tilt to pan any landscape picture using your accelerometer instead of you having to swipe left or right. There is also more emphasis on images than text so people get to see more within a content card as opposed to just headlines.

Content and Control

Before you start using Facebook paper, you are given the freedom to customize your preferred content feed. These would be news items from various sources but for some reason of other, you cannot add your own content feed into the app.

Content aggregation is probably one of the best places to start when you want to control advertising on apps. No more filler memes, nonsensical videos or borderline porn links posted on timelines as everyone will be digesting the same newsfeed on Paper. These kosher timeline feeds will make it far easier for Facebook to link advertising to them.

Second guessing a timeline post based on keywords can be a disaster for advertising so let’s not go there. Instead, put up an advert just like what Flipboard does within the content feed and you’d be safe.

What’s more it also makes sharing of kosher content so much easier on mobile devices instead. For now, Flipboard does a damn good job in that department which Paper has to match.

Paper is sans advertising and I think this is the version that should not get updated. It just feels right without having tonnes of adverts pushed my way but if you look at how the App is designed, pushing adverts can already be done natively once the servers are switched on. Advertising cards can be inserted into content feeds and there is no opting out.

Paper’s Availability on Android

This will eventually come but it will be a while. Right now Facebook is testing the app on iOS and for good reason. Google has in recent times become a competitor in the content aggregation business with Google Play Newsstands replacing the Currents app as of November 2013. Newsstands app works just like Flipboard so you get to share any content link with any app on your Android device. Whereas the Google Newsstand app is heavy in content aggregation, Paper by comparison is much lighter and will appeal to those who just want to be entertained.

Paper is probably the right direction for Facebook at least for now. Facebook has opened a new monetization channel with content aggregation, that is until you get bored with all the same news feed everyone is reading and junk it for Flipboard or Pulse. That said, Facebook’s Paper looks more like an app that would appeal to Hipsters—which is nothing more than a stop-gap measure to arrest declining revenue from a decade old service until the next big thing comes along.